Survey Says C Dominated New '08 Open-Source Projects

svonkie writes "C overwhelmingly proved to be the most popular programming language for thousands of new open-source projects in 2008, reports The Register (UK). According to license tracker Black Duck Software, which monitors 180,000 projects on nearly 4,000 sites, almost half — 47 per cent — of new projects last year used C. 17,000 new open-source projects were created in total. Next in popularity after C came Java, with 28 per cent. In scripting, JavaScript came out on top with 20 per cent, followed by Perl with 18 per cent. PHP attracted just 11 per cent, and Ruby six per cent. The numbers are a surprise, as open-source PHP has proved popular as a web-site development language, while Ruby's been a hot topic for many."

Comments

c-derived languages?

[Drantin]

Seeing as one of the projects mentioned with the most releases was in C#, is it lumping C,C++,C#, etc all under one label?

Re:c-derived languages?

[daknapp]

Which it shouldn't, as C, C# and C++ seem pretty distinct.

And what about Objective-C?

Re:c-derived languages?

[Anonymous Coward]

C is very popular for cross platform programs especially open source that don't rely on much platform specific code (c# is windows specific and c++ has some issues if you are not very careful).

But yeah, c should not count for c++ and c#. Their syntax may be similiar but they are approached and programmed quite differently (their are other languages with similiar c syntax so but they are not lumped in).

Re:c-derived languages?

[shaitand]

Technically no, practically yes. C# is .net specific and .net is windows specific. Mono is not 100% compatible.

Re:c-derived languages?

[jma05]

> Technically no, practically yes. C# is .net specific and .net is windows specific. Mono is not 100% compatible.

1. If (depending on version) Mono is not a perfect port of .NET, that makes .NET code using those bits, not cross-platform. That is not the same as windows specific. For instance, not every program written in Python will run on all platforms. Some of its' standard libraries are platform specific (Eg: msvcrt). But Python is considered cross-platform.

2. C# IS cross-platform. AFAIK the compiler implementations behave identically. It's small portions of the standard library that are at fault.

But nothing stops you from writing fully cross-platform code, if you must. Just a bit more effort.

Personally, I gave up on C#. While C# is indeed better designed than Java, Groovy integrates with Java well and fills up any of the major feature and productivity gaps that I cared for anyway.

Re:c-derived languages?

[Dynedain]

You're getting funny mods, but you're more on target than you think. All the jailbreaking stuff for the iPhone is open-source, as are the package mangers you can install after jailbreaking, and most of the apps available through those package managers. It's a pretty big collection of stuff.

Re:Just because PHP is popular

[DragonWriter]

PHP has been applied to many large scale development projects, demonstrating that you are incorrect.

Well, no.

"X has been used for Y" does not demonstrate that "X is suitable for Y".

Re:Black Duck Software?

[jonaskoelker]

Anyway, here is their actual press release

Thanks for that.

Let's compare "here" with the summary. "Here":

47% of these newly created projects used the C language. Java came in as the number two language of choice at nearly 28%. Third was Javascript at over 20%. In the world of scripting, nearly 18% of the projects chose to use Perl

Summary:

47 per cent â" of new projects last year used C. [...] Next in popularity after C came Java, with 28 per cent. In scripting, JavaScript came out on top with 20 per cent, followed by Perl with 18 per cent.

I note that 47+28+20+18 > 100, so somewhere there's a move from one "percentage pie" to the next. I would like to know which language is in which pie, and more importantly why, and why there aren't numbers for one big pie with everyone in it. I'd also like to know why the summary (which is taken from the register) and the "here" seem to be ambiguous, when read together, about which pie javascript goes into.

I don't think malice is a good explanation for all of this, so I'll assume incompetence. That goes well with the 98%-of-everything-is-crap law ;)

Re:Just because PHP is popular

[shaitand]

'But at the same time, show me a large scale project done in PHP, and I'll show you a large scale project that would have been better off in Python.'

With all do respect, I find that most worshipers at the altar of python feel the same way about anything that doesn't require C for the sake of performance.

I realize you guys feel that code should LOOK pretty. But not everyone agrees that you need the language to mandate style and FUNCTIONALLY python is no more capable than Perl (example intentionally chosen to make pythonites cring). For most web projects, php is as capable as either.

Besides, he claimed PHP was unsuitable for large projects not merely that there were better choices. PHP is suitable and demonstrably so. There are languages that aren't, like VB. There are no large projects primarily written in VB for this reason despite the fact that vb was extremely popular.

Re:Just because PHP is popular

[merreborn]

PHP has been applied to many large scale development projects, demonstrating that you are incorrect.

Well, no.

"X has been used for Y" does not demonstrate that "X is suitable for Y".

Three of the world's top 10 websites are PHP-based. Wikipedia, and facebook, along with vast chunks of yahoo.

I'm gonna go ahead and argue that "X has been successfully used for Y by 3 of the top 10 organizations in the Y industry" is pretty solid evidence that "X is fairly suitable for Y". In fact, I think you'd be hard pressed to demonstrate that "X is unsuitable for Y", given the level of success these sites continue to achieve.

WP, Facebook, and Yahoo all have their business problems, but PHP is the least of them.